SAD HIPSTER WREST EVICTED FROM WAREHOUSE

Leviathan mainman and convicted domestic abuser Jeff Whitehead (a.k.a. Wrest) is being evicted from the Portland Oregon warehouse he maintained as a storefront for his Devout Rcrds label/record store and the “anarchist print shop” Eberhardt Printsop. Whitehead is the victim of allegedly evil capitalist landlords who want to commit the horrible act of leasing their hard earned property at market price, which happens to be double that of what Wrest can afford. Therefore, Wrest has tapped his neo-communist friend Neil Jameson (who is publicly living out a similar midlife crisis) to help beg for moneytarget=”_blank” rel=”nofollow external” from “the miserable collective workforce” a.k.a. you, the consumers.  Yes, you have read correctly- Wrest is so desperate to save a commercial “Anarchist clothing line” from having its free-market commerce shut down by other free market commerce that he has stooped to digital panhandling.target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow external”
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Judas Priest – Firepower (2018)

Judas Priest came from that intermediate stage between proto-metal and hard rock that emphasized really intense conclusions to compelling but basic riffs, and with Firepower, the band returns to form by delivering those moments of ritual ascension in which the foot-stomping, hand-flinging, and head-thrashing impulses join a sense of profundity through consilience as each track comes together.

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Godflesh – Post Self (2018)

If someone goes on this tour, make sure to hand Justin Broadrick a telephone to signify that this album has been phoned in. As the term implies, when content creators are no longer focused on making their work significant, an “it’ll do” mentality results. This fits within what Godflesh and related Broadrick-acts have done through their careers.

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Accept – Rise of Chaos

Accept is a band best remembered for their old school song called “Balls to the Wall”, which used to play on the Headbanger’s Ball. Driving my BMV down the Autobahn at 120MPH through the Black Forest, I stopped in Bad Reichenhall.  You know how they always have insane amounts of Gummy Bears everywhere in Germany.  And then next to them are porno mags and stuff like biker lifestyle mags.  Those were where I found out that Accept was still going strong at the time. It never ceases to amaze. This band just keeps hanging around, like a bad STD. Here they are again 20 years later. And they have this new album Rise of Chaos, which sounds like a cross between Sabbath’s Dehumanizer and an Exodus album.

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Control Denied – The Fragile Art of Existence (1999)

Control Denied was formed in the mid-1990s by late Death-frontman Chuck Schuldiner to cater to his desire to explore more traditional metal stylings.  Schuldiner, however, was still bound to Death’s contract with Nuclear Blast and thus agreed to record one more album under the Death-moniker before concentrating fully on his new band and musical direction.  As a result, songs originally intended for Control Denied were shoe-horned into a death metal context on The Sound of Perseverance (1998) which partly explains the lackluster, two-faced nature of the last and arguably worst Death-album. With contractual entanglements finally sorted out, Control Denied’s debut The Fragile Art of Existence saw the light of day in 1999.
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Weathering the Storm as a Republican Metalhead

November 8th, 2016.  Manhattan, NY.  Election night.  I was there.

Wading back and forth between a crowd of suits and red hats gathered outside the Fox News building on 6th ave and a similar group gathered a few blocks north outside the Hilton hotel where the soon-to-be President-Elect was present, I celebrated ecstatically as electoral college results came in showing my favorite politician on the cusp of capturing the presidency.  All of us were over the moon with excitement and bliss, particularly because New York City had seldom presented a place where support of the man the media branded as Hitler 2.0 could be expressed openly.

While walking home and passing virtually every media truck parked for a mile along the road where America’s next President prepared his victory speech, a young NPR reporter excitedly rushed over to me with her microphone and cameraman after seeing the ridiculous “Trump 2020” pins on my shirt.  I agreed to her request for interview and explained why I thought Trump’s non-interventionist foreign policy and realist economic objectives would benefit the country’s middle and working classes.  Admitting her surprise to learn that I was a compliance director working near Wall St. and not the basic redneck Trump voter the media had branded us as, she asked if I was excited about the likelihood of supporting Trump being more socially acceptable now that he was president.  “Yeah” I said “It finally won’t be taboo now!”

We could not have been more wrong.
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Retirement Tours are Now a Trend

With Ozzy Osbourne announcing his second retirement tour (the first being with Black Sabbath) in 2 years, Slayer retiring, Satyricon retiring (from touring the US, the only country that matters), etc we can safely conclude that retirement tours have quickly become a trend.  This beckons an interesting question- are record execs pushing these as an attempt to cash-in on aging metal bands?

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Heavy Metal In Academia

The last two decades has witnessed an exponential growth of studies devoted to popular music, coupled with a re-evaluation of past theories and models for interpretation and analysis. This paradigm shift has sparked interest in music “at the fringes” which in turn has led to the unlikely emergence of “metal studies”: a multi-disciplinary field of research centered around all things related to metal music.

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